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Gigabyte EP45-DS3L & EP45T-DS3R

08-18-2008, 09:40 AM

Phoronix: Gigabyte EP45-DS3L & EP45T-DS3R

Intel's P45 Chipset was released this summer along with the P43, G43, and G45 Chipsets as the mainstream Eaglelake alternative to Intel's current flagship X48 Chipset. Though over the older X48 motherboards, the P45 has the advantages of using Intel's newer ICH10 / ICH10R Southbridge and support for up to 16GB of DDR2/DDR3 memory, which is double that of what's supported by the X48. Today we are looking at two Intel P45 motherboards compliments of Gigabyte with their EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R. The EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R are just two of Gigabyte's motherboards bearing the P45 Chipset but in total they have eight different motherboards using this version of the Eaglelake Chipset.

The assertion that the EP45-DS3L needs "a recent kernel (2.6.26+) in order for the SATA disk controller to be detected" is actually incorrect. I have this motherboard, and not such a recent kernel. The trick is to set SATA/IDE to AHCI in the BIOS.

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Speaking of 'tricks' , I have a EP43-DS3L (not P45) and what you said is true - enabling AHCI will enable older kernels detect this mobo.

However do NOT enable AHCI for two reasons. I saw that the iSrc AHCI bios or whatever it is, takes a loong time to start up. And most most importantly, I get half the hard-drive speeds. Example, 'hdparm -t /dev/sda' gives 55MB/s with AHCI enabled and a whopping 110MB/s with AHCI disabled.
So, best is to disable AHCI and use 2.6.26+. (In fact, 2.6.26 didn't recognize the ALC888 audio, although 2.6.24 does. 2.6.26.2 solves all issues.)
That said, do enable the native sata feature just below the ahci option. (I dont know why they disabled both by default in the bios.)

Meanwhile, I also have a Wolfdale E8400 CPU and it had detected the 9x multiplier correctly. However, overclocking is limited and I could *only* go till 3.6GHz (9X, 400MHz)- but its very very stable and cool (~40C idle, 55C loaded) even at this point.

Overall, this EP43-DS3L was the cheapest mobo with overclocking for e8400 at about < 100 USD.

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Hdparm -t /dev/sda gets 74.76 in AHCI mode, but only 52.55 with SATA as PATA.

Yfrwlf: You don't have to upgrade the whole O/S. Just the kernel. Depending upon your distribution upgrading the kernel is as easy as installing a driver update package (same process, once the kernel gets into repository).

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Well there are at least 2 drivers possible for the legacy mode, the old one creates a /dev/hdX device, the newer one (from libata) also creates /dev/sdX. So it is not only a white/black thing. Debian for example uses the old style drivers - because there are no UUIDs used, since Ubuntu 8.04 there are only libata drivers active - if you have to switch between old and new you have to use UUIDs, don't forget that when you use /dev/hdX currently... UUID together with initramfs.

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Yfrwlf: You don't have to upgrade the whole O/S. Just the kernel. Depending upon your distribution upgrading the kernel is as easy as installing a driver update package (same process, once the kernel gets into repository).

I shouldn't have to. I shouldn't need to wait on or hope for my distro repository maintainers to do that for me. I shouldn't have to have their blessing. I should have the option to do it when I want to by downloading and installing the required drivers. Software needs to be 100% easily accessible, not locked behind artificial barriers.

Not to mention I should never have to reboot. Modprobe plugs in a driver automatically, and that's the way everything should be. Fully hot-pluggable. Again, I should not have to upgrade my kernel or my OS and reboot just to install a driver. This isn't Winblowz.

I'm talking about a feature here. I'm not rehashing how things are now, I know how things are now. I'm talking about the way things should be. You shouldn't have to have distro maintainers, they should be put to work doing other things like, oh, actually programming how about and helping out Linux, not doing a bunch of redundant work with software when it should have only needed to be done once. There should be one Linux repository, called the Internet. Ideally that driver should be easily available in my repository, always, no matter the distro I'm running, but if not it should be easily installable from a website and better yet, I should be able to add the URL of that driver or program when I do so, so that I can get automatic updates from then on out.

That's the way things should be. Easy, modular, simple, automatic, so it's nothing against you, but I don't accept the answer of "just do it the old way and be happy". Open source shouldn't just be open source code, it should also mean open accessibility, in any and all forms and ways possible.

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It is not always easy like this. First of all it is not modprobe that automatically loads the drivers, it is udev. Also when you enable more drivers than before you can run into new issues - like when you use budget-av (for DVB) but you enable (and load) snd-aw2 then your DVB is dead. Another example is the new snd-pcsp driver. If you enable it and you don't let it load behind other drivers your sound will be mixed up. PulseAudio still has problems using the alsa drivers in the right order - thats why you hear somethings sound from your pc speaker with new Ubuntu. It is _not_ your hd

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Hdparm -t /dev/sda gets 74.76 in AHCI mode, but only 52.55 with SATA as PATA.

No, mine is still in SATA mode, but AHCI disabled. Changing to PATA (by disabling native sata feature) would indeed slow down I believe. Indeed, I myself was left baffled as to why with AHCI enabled I get half speed.

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It is not always easy like this. First of all it is not modprobe that automatically loads the drivers, it is udev. Also when you enable more drivers than before you can run into new issues - like when you use budget-av (for DVB) but you enable (and load) snd-aw2 then your DVB is dead. Another example is the new snd-pcsp driver. If you enable it and you don't let it load behind other drivers your sound will be mixed up. PulseAudio still has problems using the alsa drivers in the right order - thats why you hear somethings sound from your pc speaker with new Ubuntu. It is _not_ your hd

Sounds like the drivers need to be fixed then or something needs to be made aware of these special driver nuances so they can be dealt with correctly, like perhaps a driver dependency system for correct driver load order. I'm just saying Linux should always be improved upon, always made better, because it's really sad and too bad how several things have been modernized but several other things have been neglected and stuck in 1990. Any features that can be added to Linux should be, and in a modular way so that if they aren't wanted, or something else is wanted, it can be easily installed/removed. Drivers are one of them. Things should be modular enough that I can load up a driver from any source either on an installed OS or at install time, and you shouldn't have to worry about compiling anything if you don't want to. You can't call something hot-pluggable if you can only do it on a specific version of a specific distro for a specific kernel, it needs a stabilized and extensible/upgradeable API.